Ah...nothing like a little woohoo in the morning to get ready for school. Betcha River will be thinking about that ALL day.
Since today was lecture-day they had most of the morning to themselves, but of course since Haruo had to do a lecture himself in the morning, well...it was good that they headed to the cafe near the university for an early-morning brownie snack.
Then it was off to class for Haruo to teach.
And well, River decided that since her morning before the lecture was free, she would sit in on Haruo's lecture to see just exactly what it was that he was teaching.
"Good morning class, Today we'll be discussing the work of Tintoretto and his utilization of perspective in painting, a technique that is common to works today in developing realism in painted works. Perspective is a technique that is used by many artists, visually to convey an object's relationship in distance from the eye. In many respects, visual artists before this Titoretto in the Renaissance used to convey their painting in a flat one two-dimensional plane: there's the wall, there's the painting, that's it. Hence the reason why if you look at works like Bellini's or Fra Angelico, there is no depth within the painting, everything looks as though it has been painted on a wall...and you cannot visually walk within the painting with your eyes."
"Tintoretto on the other hand, unlike his contemporaries utilized the human form in a fashion, where you could visualize the way people turned their bodies to give the illusion of depth in two dimension. He was the first to visually work with that kind of perspective to give the illusion that even though the painting was on a flat two dimensional wall, that there was depth; that your eyes were tricked into seeing a background that wasn't flat against a wall...that you could visually walk your eyes into the painting and go for a stroll and assume that you were visually seeing what you would see if you walked outside this classroom today."
"If you look at your handouts" you will see a stark example of Bellini's work - Sacra Conversazione on Page 2 and further down that page you will see an example of Tintoretto's work, Finding of the body of St. Mark. If you will notice how the body is positioned in Bellini's work...it is flat and to the front as if the person was facing to the front 90 degrees to the plane of your eye-view as if the subject was facing you, and the way that the hand positions are held...are physically impossible, however that was the way that most Renaissance painters painted the human body at the time. Tintoretto in the second example used realistic body positioning and shading as well as creative uses of background perspective to give the illusion of three dimensions in a two dimensional painting surface.
"Teacher, how is it that we learn such a basic concept in Fine Arts today...but it wasn't so prevalent in the Renaissance?"
Well, we learn the basic concepts because they were painstaking developed through the years and have formed the basis of our curriculum today. Today we are more into realism in painting, but the painters of the Renaissance worked with the knowledge that they had back then and it was left up to innovators like Tintoretto to push the boundaries of the knowledge that they had and to create new techniques...that we are lucky enough to have today.
"You take a look at a work by McKinley - for example the Road Less Taken which is in Page 3 of my handout. He uses perspective in a linear fashion. You see the road coming from the corner of the image...and as your eye travels along that road, you see the trees in the image grow smaller...just as your eyes see down a road in real life. You can see how distance changes how your eyes perceive an object."
"There are three types of perspective: First being linear perspective which is that objects of a similar size appear smaller as distance between the eye and the object increases. The second being aerial perspective where we are discussing the effect of air molecules on the perception of the object as distance increases between the eye and the object. If you notice as you look down a street, that the farther away an object appears, the more indistinct in features it appears. That's because of the effect that the airspace that separates your eye and the object is having an effect on how we can visualize the object. this muddying effect is due to the water vapor present in the air that diffuses light-rays so that less light rays come back from the object to reach your eyes. Three: The Perspective of Disappearance as Leonardo Da Vinci describes it, No matter where the viewer is standing in perspective in relationship to the painting, he or she will always psychologically place his/her eye-level at the perceived height of the horizon at a width relative to the center of the painting. This means that any objects placed on the painting have to correlate with the surfaces in which they are positioned. Distance from the eyes makes the object smaller in relation to those objects that are closest to the eye. Utilize atmospheric effects in painting to trick the eye into believing that those objects are farther away in a two-dimensional surface.
As painters, we utilize perspective in a way that allows us to view a three dimensional image on a two dimensional surface with subtle effects. In otherwords, that makes us visual magicians."
Next class was Madeleine Noetal's class. And she successfully managed to put quite a few people to sleep. Clearly she was definitely insane because who comes to class in a bathing suit?
Everyone tried their best to stay awake, considering the droning lecture...
It didn't work...
It hearkened back to last week's lecture which was more of the same droning that had put people into a coma.
The final straw was when Haruo ended up falling asleep. When he woke up he decided that there was only one solution...
...and that was to take over the lecture himself...
Citing examples from the Renaissance, the Baroque, the Rococo..and other art periods, he went over the reasonings behind the works of those days...and that kept the audience riveted. In fact, Madeleine Noetal was so riveted, she didn't even notice her bladder level and peed herself. Yay for art.
It was a much happier student body that left the lecture hall that afternoon. Although I wouldn't recommend taking over a classroom for a fine arts lecture, unless you are a Level 10 in any artistic subject. Haruo was a Level 10 in both writing and painting, so well...there ya go.
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